The quest for the truth behind the Dublin-Monaghan bombings of May 17th, 1974, is slow and painful, writes Kathy Sheridan
Thirty years have taken their toll. At the Dublin City Coroner's inquest - adjourned for nearly 30 years and re-opened only a few weeks ago - the fading memories of citizens who gave honest statements in that long ago summer are painfully evident.
One witness disputes key events confidently attested to - and signed for - at the time; another vehemently denies making a second statement despite signed evidence to the contrary; another has no recollection of contacting the Garda in the first place.
On the other hand, there are witnesses such as Roger Keane, now 76, who can recall in pin-sharp detail, his repeated, exasperated calls to the Garda on that May Friday, drawing attention to a suspicious white van with British or Northern Ireland plates, parked since lunchtime outside the Department of Posts and Telegraphs where Keane worked. Though the van drove off just before a squad car arrived and less than 25 minutes before the bombings, Keane persisted. After the bombs, he kept calling until a squad car finally took him to the docks where they spotted the van, being driven, it emerged, by a British army officer about to board the ferry.
Keane went home after plain clothes gardaí arrived - but he had piqued someone's interest; the following Monday, up to four detectives arrived at his workplace to interview him. Oddly, he was never asked to sign a formal written statement. When he checked back with the gardaí, he was told not to contact them again.
The absence of follow-up was not news to veterans of this 30-year-old enigma. Two separate witnesses with clear descriptions of men who might have been involved in the bombings told the inquest they were never shown photographs of suspects. Neither was a third witness, who had an argument with a suspect in Parnell Street an hour before the explosion.
Equally, no one seemed surprised that William Kelly, a detective inspector in Dublin in 1974, was unable to recall either the name of the senior RUC officer in Portadown whom he visited (with Det Sgt Brendan Burns) as part of the investigation, or the name of the suspect passed on by that RUC officer - despite the startling detail that the named suspect was not only a UVF member, but also an officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment who was expected to be on duty at that same police station on the day of Kelly's visit.
Kelly's original statement said they had gone North "on the spur of the moment . . . to see a suspect". At the inquest, he said they went because the bombs had been assembled in Portadown.
Surely there was a detailed report written up of the visit? "I can't recall." Were notes taken? "I don't think so."
Nonetheless, veteran observers of the inquest were quietly cock-a-hoop about Kelly's revelations. After 30 years of suspicion of collusion between British security forces and loyalist bombers, here was the first witness in any forum to place a suspect within an RUC police station and the British army, a suspect furthermore, who continued to work in the security forces in the full knowledge of the senior officer whose job it was to vet UDR candidates.
And thus are the links in the chain being painfully, slowly, forged. It has been a long, long journey to the City Coroner's court for the families of the dead and survivors of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. Ireland was another country in 1974. Ordinary people trusted the authorities. They had yet to find the confident, communal voice of dissent that is commonplace now.
A memory common to all of them is how quickly the story died. Bernie McNally, then 16, who was blinded in one eye and left disfigured, recalls coming out of hospital after six weeks, and "feeling suddenly scared of going out . . I said to my father: 'people will be talking', and he said: 'Bernie, it'll be history by Christmas' ". She pauses. "It was history in six weeks."
The family of Siobhan Rice, the 19-year-old civil servant from Wexford who was killed in Talbot Street, also found people forgot "in a matter of weeks". Yet, for 30 years there has been "a shroud . . . a spectre" over them, says her sister, Aileen. Another sister Liz, then 15, remembers going to the railway station that Friday evening, expecting to meet Siobhan off the train . . . and waiting and waiting. "I often say about that night that I went down to the station a girl and I came home a woman."
It wasn't only the public which was forgetting. Six weeks after the biggest single atrocity in the State's history, perpetrated in the heart of the capital, the Garda investigation, astonishingly and inexplicably, was being wound down. The bombings had killed 34 people, including an entire family of four and an unborn child and left 26 young children without a parent. In their grief and struggle to survive, it simply never occurred to the families the State would betray them. The truth didn't dawn for many years.
Denise O'Neill, just eight when her father, Edward, was killed while getting his two young boys a haircut, had always "assumed, right up to 1988 or '89, that whoever did it was in prison". Then something she read prompted her to ring the Garda Press Office just to find out for sure. "They told me the files were still open and there hadn't been a prosecution. I was . . . God . . I was horrified".
Margaret Urwin, now campaign secretary for the Justice for the Forgotten group, admits that just like others unaffected by the bombings, "they certainly weren't a great concern of mine, although I did attend some of the little services at the memorial in the Garden of Remembrance".
Then she adds almost incidentally: "And I would have been aware the Special Branch were watching people going to those and to the memorial Masses in the Pro-Cathedral."
It was when she saw the 1993 Yorkshire Television/Channel 4 documentary on the bombings, The Hidden Hand, with its questions about possible collusion and the sudden collapse of the Garda investigation, that she was galvanised to act.
Shortly after that broadcast, Denise O'Neill and a few others had gathered 45,000 signatures to petition for a full public inquiry. Meanwhile, the then minister for justice, Nora Owen, had agreed to look into the Channel 4 documentary.
In 1995, she told the families that if they managed to resurrect new evidence, they should bring it to her. After all the grief and struggling to find out what had happened to their loved ones, and being stone-walled at every turn, that still stings.
But it appears to have galvanised them. In 1996, Justice for the Forgotten was formed and two legal stalwarts of the campaign - solicitor Greg O'Neill and Cormac O Dulachain SC - became involved. O'Neill began with a simple written query to the RUC. Could they confirm if it had carried out a murder investigation? The answer, in short, was an astonishing no.
A £50,000 (€63,500) gift from a mysterious, disillusioned ex-Fianna Fáil man helped to fund cases to the High and Supreme Courts seeking to have Garda files made available to the European Court of Human Rights (a circuitous but necessary process of discovery). The Irish courts weren't willing to assist and the case was thrown out of the European court on grounds of time lapse. It was a dark moment.
Then, at a meeting to review strategy, some bright spark wondered: "Whatever happened to the inquests?" It emerged that an adjournment had been granted in 1974 on a Garda application, and in the words of one source, "any resumption was entirely dependent on the Garda coming back to the Coroner". They never did.
And thus, did the Dublin City Coroner, 25 years later, find himself with the mammoth task over which he now presides, complete with the fading memories, missing files from both the Garda and Department of Justice and valuable witnesses since dead (with the Garda not being particularly forthcoming, it seems, about who precisely is dead or alive). He also faced the real friction generated by an absolute refusal by the Northern authorities, including the forensic chemist to whom crucial samples were sent for analysis 11 days after the bombing, to engage with the inquest. "They are treating the families, the Irish State and the Dublin City Coroner with total contempt", says one legal participant.
While, for the families, the inquest is providing - at last - some information about how precisely their loved ones died, for some veteran observers, this is about more than justice for the families affected by the bombings on May 17th, 1974. They firmly believe the information being eked out about the Dublin-Monaghan atrocities could, if the will had been there to bring them to light in the mid-1970s, have prevented as many as 70 murders between 1974 and 1976. "The bombers could have been tried in the North," says one legal source close to the case. "Extradition would not have been an issue because it was common law murder."
The question now, after the Barron inquiry and the Joint Oireachtas Committee hearings, is where to go from here. Denise O'Neill will settle for nothing less than a full public inquiry. "Where has the private \ inquiry got us?" Justice for the Forgotten is taking the more pragmatic route, recognising that in a time when public inquiries are fast going out of favour, this is primarily a political decision. Margaret Urwin says the group for now will base its responses on the outcome of various processes in train. These include the promised Dáil debate on the Oireachtas Committee's proposal for an inquiry in the North (Greg O'Neill has already say that "British co-operation must be assured if the committee's recommendation on the issue of collusion and the appointment of an international judge is to make sense"). And also the long-delayed legislation - the Commission of Inquiries Bill - required before an independent inquiry can be instigated into the missing files and the collapse of the Garda investigation.
This weekend will be one of mixed emotions for the 50 or so taking the bus to Monaghan for the unveiling of a memorial tomorrow.
They will reflect that a lot has been achieved since 1999, when the then Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, ruled out an independent inquiry.
And still, Bernie McNally's prosthetic lens itches and hurts and requires an operation every 18 months. Not the self-pitying type, she remembers May 17th, 1974, "like it was yesterday". Edward O'Neill - four when he saw his father die in Talbot Street - faces another major operation on his neck to remove more shrapnel.
As for the numbers who quite simply went mad with grief or died of it, we can never know.